


Pretend to be Just Passing By

by Ladycat



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Post-Episode: s04e07 Weaponized, derek hale's man pain, mostly just talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 18:24:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2120115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s good, Derek thinks, looking into golden eyes for the first time in a week. It’s right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretend to be Just Passing By

**Author's Note:**

> Brandi gave me a prompt and this is... vaguely related to what she asked for? 
> 
> Title and internal lyrics (sorry, I know) are from Joan Armatrading's [Weakness in Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a8MRbHf5pA)

He doesn’t know what to say.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe after all this time the silence he cloaked himself in becomes permanent. Wolves don’t have cocoons, don’t go through metamorphosis—but humans do. Men and women buffeted past things they don’t understand and cannot deal with, shards of their former selves a path they continually crawl along.

Or maybe he should just stick to silence. The safety of emptiness.

He definitely shouldn’t try similes. Stiles would—

Stiles won’t know.

Derek won’t look in the mirror any longer. The kaleidoscope has finally come to rest again and this time it’s on a shade that makes Derek want to cry uncle. Or just cry. He almost did, once, razor fisted in one hand, caught by a gleam that is _wrong_ , fixing him to the spot while he can’t look away. The face that stares back is the one his mother never got to see. The one she _expected_ to see and all Derek can think is how he wants to claw it off. The weakness in him.

_(why do you come here?)_

Derek doesn’t shave any longer. Bright surfaces are avoided with flat, blank stares on good days, thrown over cloths on bad ones. There are a lot of bad days, hurrying from one death trap to another, constantly surrounded by the scent of blood that is mostly imagined (because he can’t smell it any more, can’t smell _anything_ and the horror of that wakes him moments after he finally sleeps, gasping against screams he won’t release) and the need to do, to go, to… help? It used to be _survive_. That was Derek’s word, last of the Hales and their destroyer.

But he isn’t. Not any longer.

_(when you know I’ve got troubles enough)_

“I hate him.” The lack of anything like a greeting serves the same purpose. Stiles is red-cheeked, low along his jaw and flaring up towards a mouth bitten to chapped rawness. Derek hates to see that; remembers when it meant something else.

“There’s a long list.”

“Funny. Like you don’t know who I mean.”

There _is_ a list, and it is long. Derek heard it once, tucked beneath a window while Stiles ranted to random guild buddies or whatever spectral online presence that had been cold comfort at the time. Being friends with the supernatural is difficult when things are peaceful. Derek remembers that too well.

Stiles rolls his eyes, collapsing in a huff onto the chair across from Derek. The one that—but Derek doesn’t think about her or the mission he paid for. Thinks instead about the Italian end table that is once again bearing scuffed footwear and realizes that yes, yes he does know what Stiles means.

“It could be,” he says. Slowly. Thoughtfully. There’s silence in between every word and Derek clings to it.

Stiles is nothing but _noise_. It never ends, the heaving wheeze of his lungs, the too quick pound of a syncopated heartbeat. Derek’s always wondered if it’s the drugs that occasionally shove Stiles’ heart out of rhythm, or if it’s something inborn, a trait to pile up with all the confusing, maddening traits, the constant movement or jabbering of a boy with too much brain and not enough sense.

Derek doesn’t let himself enjoy the return of sound to his life. Not at all.

Too bright eyes watch him so Derek turns his attention over fully. Stiles holds back from nearly everyone except a chosen few. Derek used to think that was Scott and only Scott. Now, though—now this is the third or fourth time that Stiles has arrived on his doorstep, pushing his way in when there’s definitely no one but Derek around, offering information like Derek has a right to it, like they’re there to help each other.

_(why do you call me)_

“There is a really simple solution to all of this,” Stiles says now, gaze as fierce as an eagle’s as it circles prey.

“We tried that already,” Derek snorts. 

But his right hand flexes like it would dig out circles of blood if he could.

“We already—wait, seriously? Already? I just meant we actually acknowledge the evil-Uncle shaped hole in the world, not to—but you would? Because I would be very down for that! I figured it would take persuasion and graphs and pleading on bended knee since usually it’s only Mal—”

_(when you know I can’t answer the phone)_

And just like that, the swifthuntkill of Stiles’ ire is replaced by a boy still only becoming a man. His face doesn’t crumple, there’s no tell-tale hitch, no overt sign of anything. Instead there’s silence. A horrible, vulnerable, aching kind of silence that Derek knows all too well.

Scott had been over yesterday. The conversations are nearly friendly. This particular topic had been delivered hastily, reluctantly, but Scott had still turned it over like Derek wouldn’t really understand.

Of course Derek understands. He’s had nearly a decade of (blue) familiarity with it.

“She’ll understand,” Derek offers, shifting awkwardly. He’s not good at comfort and doesn’t really understand why he wants to offer it. “She’s—she’s a Hale.”

“Smart, vicious, bad with words except when it comes to twisting them?”

_(make me lie)_

Derek offers the tiniest of smirks. “No, that’s you.”

_(when I don’t want to)_

“And that isn’t what I meant. She’s strong. She knows herself, her own mind. She won’t be manipulated, but she won’t abandon people who’ve helped her just because she’s hurt.”

“You really think so?”

Stiles wears vulnerability so poorly. A shabby coat three sizes too small with a torn out hem and blood on the sleeves. It isn’t him in ways Derek is only just starting to understand, just starting to _see_. It doesn’t matter that he feels blind, muffled by cotton as the world grows smaller and smaller around him, a cavern of pain just waiting to envelope him. He used to want that. Spent years—

But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Reaching across the table, Derek wraps his fingers around Stiles’ wrist. Hand holding isn’t appropriate here—it says too much—but a brace is camaraderie, is solidarity against whatever it is that nips the back of their knees or claws at the base of their throats. 

“I know so,” Derek says, squeezing as hard as he can.

Stiles doesn’t even wince.

_(and make someone else some kind of unknowing fool)_

A moment passes. Another. Stiles doesn’t breathe as rapidly as he did, lets it turn slower, calmer still as he wraps his hand around Derek’s wrist in return, tight and painful. It’s good, Derek thinks, looking into golden eyes for the first time in a week. It’s right.

“I’ll kill Peter before he hurts her,” Stiles vows.

Anyone else, even Scott who wears the mantle of power so much better than Derek ever did, and it would be comical. Derek even smiles; draws his lips back and back, towards the dimple his mother used to tease him about, showing teeth his sisters used to threaten with braces. 

Anyone else might mistake it for humor. But then, Stiles isn’t anyone else.

“I’ll kill him before he hurts anyone,” is Derek’s oath, sworn on that expanse of gold, so much of it that he could drown, and for the first time since he woke up in clothes too small with no memory of how he got there, back in Beacon Hills again, he doesn’t think it looks bad at all. In fact, he could learn to appreciate it. 

_(You make me stay when I should not, are you so strong or is all the weakness in me)_


End file.
